On the Loss of Contention

or~ "I'm Not So Much Leaving EVE, as I Just Don't Know if I'll Ever be Back..."

You see, this happened...

CCP... you should have opened the door.

All you EVE players, here's a clue, look at the color of the station door touchpad above...

I'ma digress here and fill in a little background, if for some reason you actually follow my strange little blog, please bear with me, I hope to make this worth your while.

First off this is the sixth, and last, installment of what I call my "Contention" series. One post about what happened, “Incarna, MT and the Jita Riots” and why. Three posts about how we, the playerbase of EVE Online, forced CCP to stop working on First Person gameplay in EVE Online, and the consequences that followed. One post in story form about what I think we all have missed out on. And finally this last post, about my, and Tur's, personal journey.

Incarna, MT, Riots… and The Director’s Retreat

The "Contention" Series:
On the EVE of Contention
On the Bone of Contention
On Getting Back in Contention

A Story of What Might Have Been...
Worlds and Stations
 
What is to Come for Old Tur
On the Loss of Contention (this post)
 
I am an EVE Online player. I have been for just over 10 years now, Nov. 2010 to today. In my approach to and enjoyment of gaming I have a few steadfast rules, or better yet, quirks...
(1) I generally devote the vast majority of my gametime to only one game... and
(2) as only one character, my virtual alter-ego Turamath Elrandir, 'Tur' to my friends.

Turamarth Elrandir and his Associate Lieutenants, ALt's for short.

This is simply my preference, my playstyle... I am Tur, I speak for him here and ingame because his thoughts and feelings, hopes and desires, pride and shame, laughter and sorrows are obviously mine... this is not roleplay or pretense, he is my presence in these virtual worlds.
 
My interest in PC/online gaming started with "DOOM" followed by many of those early First Person Shooter (FPS) copycats, and also in my favorite FPS Fighter Pilot game, "Descent". In those two First Person virtual gaming playstyles, I found that my Path to True Virtual Enlightenment was The Big Dream...

A Dream to play a game with these four five things...

(1) Primary FPS gameplay (First & Third Person)
(2) Set in a SciFi/Future (or Alternative Timeline)  Persistent, Fully Open Sandbox Universe.
(3) Where PVE is really just a "job" to make “money" but it is NOT "the point" of the game.
(4) Where PVP is mostly unavoidable, but it is also NOT "the point" of the game, but it IS part of the core nature of the game.
(5) Where The Point of The Game, is the players.

The "content" is the result of event and randomness plus the emergent player created story, or rather as we in EVE know very well, the players create our own History. We are The Point.
 
My dream was to have "living emergent experiences" in an Immersive SciFi based First Person (and Third Person) mixed PVE & PVP gameplay in an open virtual sandbox universe with an endless number of TOOLS & TOYS to "DO" STUFF with/in/about/to/etc.
 
There would be no "perfect safety" as there is no perfect safety in the Real World. There would be rules providing levels of safer and less safe gameplay, where the choices, decisions, actions and reactions of the players is the true "content".
 
From mid November of 2010 until mid November of the Year That Shall Not be Named... EVE Online was as close as it got for me. In EVE I had “most” of The Dream. I got to live and explore a massive SciFi Universe... in EVE's case over 7,800 star systems with hundreds of thousands of planets, moons, asteroids, stations, gates, cosmic anomalies and "stuff" to explore, resources to collect, harvest and sell and of course, NPC's and players to fight.

In EVE we have a True Sandbox where PVE is mostly just a grindy job and PVP is the Horribad Weather you can't completely avoid. PVE/PVP gameplay in a truly open virtual sandbox universe.
 
But in EVE we do not have any First Person gameplay. In fact we don't even really have true Third Person as you actually never see yourself. IE your "body", just the exterior view of the ship you are in at the moment.

Now please understand for the last 10 years, "three out of four" hasn't been bad AT ALL. I have loved EVE and the friends and frienemies, the good times and the bad, the beauty and the horror, and most of all, the shared life experiences.

EVE is a beautiful, extremely complex, strategic and tactical game.

Shared Living Experiences... memories of the things YOU did and the stuff that happened to YOU where you start with, "I remember the time that..." and "I was there when...", this very blog was created to be a journal of my living experiences in EVE Online... but that may be over now, or at least it may not be about my & Tur's virtual life in "EVE Online" anymore.
 
While I do tend to actively play only one game, I have sorta kept up on what's going on in the greater world of gaming, especially in MMO Space games. So back in May of 2015 I spent $39 on a Star Citizen Base Level Game Package, including 1,000UEC ("United Earth Credits", IE Star Citizen ISK) and one of the noob ships, the small yet surprisingly decent and quite fun ship to learn the game's mechanics with, the Aurora MR.

The Aurora MR in warp, that's actually ME in the pilot seat.

The Aurora is basically a Light Armed Shuttle. Single seat with no "cargo hold" as such. The cockpit is forward with a single small sleeping bunk aft, joined by a small companionway with axial port and starboard access hatches and that's it.

The rear two thirds of the ship is all engines, tankage, electronics bays, weapons, defenses, etc. The companionway area can be used to carry standard “box” packages, but no real cargo, or a passenger or two.

Noob Ship, least “useful” in game

I logged on a few times over the next year, then less and less often. I'd update the client and poke around a bit. Year after year I saw nothing I could call "playable content" but, there were definitely incremental and very interesting improvements and the project is very ambitious and truly grandiose in scope... so I'd log off and wait.
 
And I held on to hope, as so many did, and as so very many others complain and whine and rage about... WOULD this game ever really be Something? Maybe even Something REALLY Good? one day..? some day..? eventually? So we all just hoped and prayed to the neon god we'd made (lookin' at you Roberts) that Star Citizen would go live with a reasonable amount of enjoyable gametime left before the heat death of the universe...  <grumble, grumble>

As time wore on all I can really tell you is... I stopped loggin' in even yearly for reasons I remember not, apathy most likely... so much so that I when I recently decided to check on Star Citizen's progress, I found I had also un-installed it at some point... huh.

I assume it was because my system is a very old and hoopty as shit laptop. It's an HP Pavilion "Sleekbook" 15 FFS. Yet it surprisingly still passed the CPU and min video standards to run SC... just not enough RAM. SC needs 16GB and they mean it... will not even boot with less.

It was at this point that three things came together that may change my gaming forever... (A) this past Sept I turned (mumble 60 mumble) and when I decided to see what our Mr. Roberts has been up to but couldn't due to hoopty laptop, I (B) started watching a few Star Citizen Youtubers and DAMN, I mean just DAMN! I seriously needed to login and check this out.
 
So (C) we decided my B-Day prezzie to me would be a new computer system... I promptly ordered a Dell G7 17-7700 Gaming Laptop.

Specs as purchased for them as are interested:

PROC:   10th Generation Intel(R)Core(TM) i7-10750H
            12MB Cache, up to 5.0 GHz, 6 cores
RAM:    16GB DDR4-2933MHz - 2x8GB SODIMMs
            up-gradeable to 32GB
STO:     512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
VID:      NVIDIA(R) GeForce RTX(TM)2070 8GB DDR6
MON:    17.3 inch FHD (1920 x 1080) 300 nits
            144Hz 9ms 72% color gamut with Eyesafe
OS:       Windows 10 Pro (64bit)
 
My new system took two weeks to arrive and now three weeks later... I got it setup, installed Star Citizen (and ED and yes, EVE) and logged in. I spent the next week figuring out the keybindings to use keyboard, mouse & joystick.

SC has built in default bindings for the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, among others, I died more than a few times before I swapped the Y (roll) & Z (yaw) joystick axes and BOOM, now I am very comfortable with takeoff, flight, warping and landing.

In many ways the flight mechanics and "feel" are very similar to Elite Dangerous which is the ONLY other game I play to any real degree, and which I play solely because of the flight mechanics. The flight mechanics in SC are similar, but they can give you this...

Landed neatly atop one of the tallest buildings in ArcCorp.

So I started googling EVERYTHING... filled my Star Citizen browser folder with bookmarks, I read and read and read posts and forums and blogs and watched hours of streamers and Youtube guides and How-To's to get comfortable moving and interacting in this New (to me) Amazing and yes, buggy crash prone and Still In Fukkin Alpha, First Person explorable and interactable universe.

Is this then, The Dream?

Pretty much. Now when I login I experience every "waking" moment in the game in First Person, as myself, as Tur... I actually "wake up" in my bed in my "Hab" (apartment).

Wakee, wakee, eggs and bakie...

I check what I'm wearing, change to whatever will be appropriate for the days planned rigors...

My preferred suit... a mix based on the Lynx Core and other armor.

or, the Novikov Extreme Weather Armor

Then I "walk" over to the door and push the "GREEN" button... and the DOOR OPENS! I walk out into one of many possible rough hallways or luxury corridors depending on where I am (System/planet/moon/station/etc) in the 'verse.

The Door is GREEN

The Door is OPEN

Now I Walk In Stations and Walk In Ships and Walk On Worlds and Walk On Moons and I Mine Stuff BY HAND and I Fly Spaceships and Run Up and Shoot People in Da Face!! and I do ALL OF IT in the game as Myself! First Person (& Third) POV and gameplay all rolled into One Seamless Real Time Persistent Virtual Experience.

I will SHOOST YOU IN DA FACE!!!!

So... I now have all four parts of The Dream.

Such a crying goddamn shame that when CCP made a serious effort to invest in Walking In Stations, IE First Person gameplay in EVE, they dropped they trousers and cowered in fear of their own playerbase and backed away from WIS faster than a cat inna rockin' chair convention... But now, from this past week of my personal experience of Star Citizen gameplay... I have seen and experienced EXACTLY what we gave up and missed out on in EVE.

CCP talked about this...

Walking in Stations

and this...

Walking in Stations IN New Eden with the Capsuleers

and this...

Fighting in Stations and on the Ground and Inside and Outside of Ships

 

And what did we actually get? 17 YEARS of...

The Floating Burnt-Up and Flash-Frozen Dead...

And that's it... That's all we've ever had. 17 years of Corpses.

 

Is there a Downside to Star Citizen?
You better believe it... Oh Yes, yes, yes...  after 10 years Star Citizen is still very very much in “Alpha” and is still very much "Under Construction" and oh hell yes the bugs and crashes and general weirdness during the extended growing pains of the code can get down right irritating... so??

It is not a finished game yet and NO ONE is lying to ANYONE about that so <shrug>. Anyone who decides to play Star Citizen at the current time either accepts that it is a "work in progress" with all that entails, or you don't.
 
If you are not interested in any of the above, if what you want is a finished, polished and  published game, if you are not interested in backing and/or being a part of a work of this nature while it's “in progress”, then just don't ok?

But, if you do... then you get to be there to watch it unfold and fly, or unfold and die... and as far as I am concerned after only a few weeks of learning to fly my ships and... gods be praised, fly like Superman... my money, and what time I have for gaming, is on Star Citizen's future based on the simple fact that I can PLAY in that world RIGHT NOW...

EVA is more fun than I though it would be... and I had HIGH expectations.

And Yes, as far as I am concerned, it has fully playable content right now. Playable, from waking up in your bunk and heading down to the space port, selecting a ship, entering it, settling down in the pilots seat then choosing content such as...

Box Delivery Contracts (I call em “FedUPS”).
You decide to make some quick & easy CR and look over the available Box Delivery Contracts... Let's see, OH! here's one, “Finish a Covalex Delivery”, it seems that the Covalex Shipping Hub “Gundo” went out of communication and this family is willing to pay handsomely to get their package delivered. Cool.

Gundo Hub, dead and cold, maybe there will be clues to what happened

You take off, align and warp out to the station and yup... it's dark and dead... big ol hole where a large window used to be... crap floating all over. OK, you check weapons and ammo, go EVA and head over to the station, I wonder what, or who, we'll find...

 

Searching this dead station was SOOOOOOOOOO COOL...

 

Trade.
Again, as all things in SC are right now, a Work In Progress so not all fleshed out but man... the first time I went back to my ship after buying 16SCU (Std. Cargo Unit, 1m3)... I dropped the tail ramp and almost cried.

 

Satisfyingly Full Cargo Hold

Mining.
In EVE mining is sitting and fighting to stay awake as the mining lasers drone on and on and on... In SC mining is flying out to a potentially good belt, planet or moon, explore by scanning for deposits, then mine and collect the spoils.

 

You can either have a mining ship, such as the Prospector, the Mole or the Orion or a Greycat ROC mining rover or... you can land your ship and go EVA, on foot, equipped with a man portable mining laser and backpack.

Engaging active gameplay, risky solo but lucrative and fun

 

You scan for, find, then heat and break up rocks with high value/small volume resources... the best ores and strikes are often deep in unmapped cave systems... where other players may also be seeking their pot-o-gemstones... they just might want to let you do all the hard work first is all.

Hadanite gemstone

 

So an unequivacal YES, there is some boring to fair to actually quite good and interesting PVE available. AND, so far every time I get back in my ship with the Gundo Job package, as I'm getting ready to fly back to Port Olisar (and once before I even got back into my ship) I get attacked by NPCs...   =]

 

You can choose to fight or try to run. Running is viable as aligning at "Runaway! speed" (AB/boosting) to any warpable, toggling warp, spooling up and warping out can be done fairly quickly, if you keep your cool. So far I have not seen anything akin to webs or points in SC. And of course, you will grind up aUEC (credits). The Gundo Job pays 8000CR, not amazing, but not shabby either and it's a quick and fun contract.

 

I have found the package in 3 different rooms and once floating outside the station wayyy on the other side from the entry point... that makes this one repeatable yet still interesting.
 
The main idea here, and what they are actually delivering on... is Immersion. You can, if you want, login and just run right out the door ignoring all of that or... you can 'wake up', 'get out of bed' and go about your 'virtual day' in whatever degree of "immersion" you like.

But in the end it is YOU. The avatar is of "your" physical being, not some ship "you" are cocooned deep inside of, packed away in a pressurized can of podgoo... the "Immortal Godlike Capsuleer" is an Immortal Godlike Sardine...   yuch. I hate it, always have... hate the term, “Capsuleer” too and always have, it sounds so made up to me.

No... now I spend my time walking the 'verse as a human being should, as a Starship Captain should. I pick out my civies or my suit and armor, I choose my weapons, ammo and med gear and pack carefully, then I pick my ship. I have to "walk through the station" to get to it. I cycle through the airlock and walk out into the cold hard black... and there my ship awaits on the landing pad. I walk over, climb aboard, take the pilots seat and then "I" fly my ship.

 

Ahhhhh...  now THAT's more like it.

And my friends can join me, or I can join them, and we all take our places at the helm, co-pilot, weapon and tactical stations... all of us in the sky together... as it should be.

I was influenced the most by 2 games back in the day... Doom and Descent. One was The Groundbreaking First Person Shooter and the other was a First Person Zero-G Flying Shooter. I have long wished for this day... the day when I could play in a virtual world as me, in First Person the whole time, and interact with the entire gameworld as me everywhere, and in every way...

Star Citizen is that virtual universe.

Oh, and one last thing, a personal note...
Hey Rixx, it looks like I was right.

You gotta Walk the Walk...
=/|)=

Stress

~or "A Serious Uptick in 'Karen' Sightings Follows in the Wake of the Covid Pandemic."

Well... here we are 8 months into the New Normal... 8 months since Covid and the Lock Downs and the Stay-at-Home Orders and Masks and Riots and all the shit that followed... and I, like most, am just fukkin stressed out...   <sigh>

We have been been doing what we assume many if not most have been. Staying home... mostly... Not going out shopping... mostly... Hell, not even sailing FFS... we lost the first 4 months of the 2020 regatta season to Covid...   <sigh>

Also, I have been in the office since the last week of March. I am considered "essential" as I work with the hardware aspects of VDI supporting the flood of new work-from-home users... weird huh? I am a 30 year career IT Support Tech who just this past Sept turned 60... so I am one of the 3 guys who has been "in the office" everyday for the last 7 months...   <sigh>

Wanna talk about weird? Try spending Mar, Apr, May, June & most of July working ALONE in an empty 35 cubicle office space. I have a break kitchen, a fridge, microwave, etc. all to myself... I get to have the lights however I like, only 1/3rd on. I "was" actually OK with this... until August when the company started allowing people to come back in...   <sigh>

Other than that, my lady and I are doing well. She retired and now lives here with me which makes her very happy cause Virginia in the Fall is SOOOOO much nicer than Chicago... pretty much anytime... especially now. My kids are doing ok, both are seniors (HS) and both are Virtual Schooling and working their way through it like all of us, but they are basically safe and well.

So it might seem like why so stressed Tur? We haven't gotten sick, I'm still working, we did get to start sailing some again in Aug and all the rest is really not that hard, right?

Well, I agree on the face of it and I am grateful as hell for all the above but... Man the times are just so strange and the politics and riots and hatred and just plain weirdness in the world... I just don't know what's gonna happen next...

And that's the thing. We have all lost that unspoken, background sense of surety that tomorrow will come, things will be pretty much as they have been and we can make plans... we can look "forward" with some sense of hope that our plans are worth making and working towards.

Not any more. That's over. The future is frightening... our plans for the future went from how do I improve my schooling/my job/my career/my life or even, planning for retirement... to just WTAF is next????

And I think that's where all the insanity in politics and our social lives is really coming from. You send everyone home, shut down a huge percentage of the economy because there is a deadly disease that we know so little of the actual truth about (still today due to misinformation). Then the evil and the greedy and the just downright crazies really got busy... inundating social media with disinformation, agitprop (look it up) and the truth gets buried under the Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics... and all that does is feed the fear and the fear feeds the anger and hate... and you end up with the Portland CHAZ. Top that off with our current seriously shitty choices for the Highest Office in America... neither one of those Aholes really deserves it, and we all know it, no matter who's sign you plant in your yard.

So yea... I'm pretty stressed out.

But... I have my lady, my kids, sailing and, I was surprised to find out... I still have EVE.

I logged back on recently and carefully packed "Canterbury" my Orcabago Floaty Home of Ineptitude with a selection of ships, a max-tank Mackinaw, a cloaky scanning Astero, several PVE frigates and a PVE cruiser and a handful of shuttles. Then I jumped in my fastest frigate and set out to find a nice quiet .6 or .5 Hisec system near enough to Jita to keep the store runs manageable but far enough away from the madding crowds and the Trig war to have a modicum of a sense of safety.

I found just such a system and made the trip back in the Cant', unpacked and got all settled down in some random corp's Tatara, my new Home Away from Home as 'twere. Over the last week I have spent some really nice quiet evenings munching my way through the highest value ores, at least the one's that remain, as we all experience the 'verse during Hilmar's Great Resource Rebalance...

Now please understand that I have always hated mining... not so much actually with the lame gameplay, though Lame Gameplay is Lame... it was always really about the extremely low ISK per hr. that really got me panties inna bunch. You see as a wormholer when we ran C5 and C6 sites there were nights when I made over a billion ISK... a BILLION ISK! just running PVE sites in a fukkin FLEET in just ONE night! and I personally would bank over 1,000,000,000 ISK! So why oh why would I want to spend many HOURS over multiple DAYS mining... for under 100M ISK? I mean seriously, it was just really not worth it... until now.

Now, it's really OK with me... I have changed, I broke one of my Hard & Fast EVE Rules back in Feb when I finally broke down and bought PLEX, and then sold it for ISK. Something I had never done not once in almost 10 years ingame. I had made myself a Solemn Vow when I started playing back in 2010 that I would "By the Gods Make it on My Own or Not At All!" IE I would never "Cheat" and "buy" my "income"...

I kept that sworn promise to myself for near onto 10 years... oh well. So it goes huh? So how much I make is no longer nearly as important as it was... now I fly because I just want to... and yes, now EVE is more "just a game" to me than it was during those heady 10 years... but, well "Change IS the Only Constant."

Oh and one last thing... you see in EVE I still have a little of that old sense of surety about the future... Oh, I know there are Ebil Portents of Dire Changes and Bad Things are Happening in EVE... but it really has always been that way, right? which is it's own kind of "surety" isn't it?  =]

  Live safe, but fly dangerously, my good friends.

=/|)=

Strange Days...

~or "Kiting Corona"

Pandemic...

I, like the rest of you, really did not think I would live to see a world wide event the likes of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, but Covid-19 looks like it wants to give it a go...

Thankfully we have an additional 102 years of medical and technological advances to lean on as compared to the Doctors, establishment and populace of 1918. I mean they had the genome of this virus fully mapped inside of the 1st 2 weeks FFS. And it is just that, the medical/scientific/technological resources that we can bring to bear in the 21st century that just might keep it from being our Spanish Flu.

Which is exactly what the push for "social distancing" is for... to slow the spread in order to give our greatly advanced medical establishment the TIME to work out therapies and hopefully, the Holy Grail... an effective vaccine.

But...
We all have been walking the paths of our lives and in the space of 2 months, we all, every one of us, walked up to find a divide... a cliff crossing the path of all our lives... and no one has any real concrete idea of what awaits us on the other side.

We have our individual and collective wishes and hopes, and we have reason for hope in the knowledge and technology we have available to us today... but, ALL the plans we ALL have made for the future have been put on hold... by the very real fear of illness and yes, death.

The world is holding it's collective masked and gloved breath... and that is the reality of each of all of our days now. We are all staring at our phones and PC's and tablets and TVs and we read and post and comment and discuss and, more than all of that, we each worry and ask ourselves how are we going to get through this? What plans can we make, how can we implement them, how can we afford them?

I find myself walking through the house with a can of disinfectant wipes in one hand and a wipe in the other wiping down everything I might touch in a normal day... all the doorknobs, all the faucet handles in the kitchen and bath, the light switches... all of them, every single one of them.

You see my lady and I live in a shared house. It is a very nice 4 bedroom, 2 bath ranch on a scenic and quiet side street in one of the many quintessential Small Southern American Towns... think Mayberry. It is rented out by-the-room and we live here with three other's. A college student, a teacher from the college and a Tech salesman.

This has it's own set of worries for us. You see my lady is (mumble, mumble) with a history of asthma and COPD and I will be 60 this September and I have a history of asthma & bronchitis and I am a Diabetic. I am happy to say I have not been bothered by asthma or bronchitis and the Diabetes seems to be under control since I got back into crewing on racing sailboats. I have lost a lot of weight and am in far better overall health now but still... 60 with a Hist'ry... so we do the multiple times daily antibacterial wipe down of EVERY shared surface.

I could not believe how I felt the day I found 2 boxes (SAS Safety Corp, "Astro-Grip" Powder-free Nitrile Examination Gloves, 100 count) at the back of a bottom shelf at the parts store. When I hesitated holding both boxes, the store clerk said, "Buy both man, the last guy bought five boxes, I think he missed those."

I wear exam gloves to go shopping now.

I sit on my porch and watch the world go by and it all looks the same... but it's not.

Taken in perspective I feel certain we will be ok as a race and as a collection of nations states around the world. I feel basically that things will find a new normal which will look pretty much like the old normal, but mebbe with a few new cultural twists.

How many "twists" from the old normal will depend on how far we go getting from 'old' to 'new'. 2, 4, 6 months? I don't think too much will permanently change... a year? a year and a half? Who knows what kind of cultural changes social distancing and remote learning/working will make over time.

Taken in another perspective... according to the web there are 7.8 billion of us. The worst projection I have seen, so far, is (The New York Times), "As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die." This is 0.02 percent of the worlds population.

You can look it up, you can math too. For the people and the families and friends of those represented by that innocuous number "1.7 million" it is a tragedy and a horribly felt personal loss and heartache and pain... but, it is also 0.02 percent of the total of the human race.

So this is bad yes, very bad and we all need to be smart and fight it with the tools that we KNOW work. We are throwing every possible medical research and technology we can at it but We The People must also fight it with the tools WE ALL have. Personal hygiene and due to the potential for airborn transmission (sneezing and coughing), we also need to use social hygiene... keeping ourselves at a safe distance while this is in the spreading stages and while they work to find therapies and medicinals.

My kids grew up with a saying they both despised, when they said, "I wasn't trying to hit him/her/it/they/that!" I would respond...

"I don't care that you 'weren't trying to'... I care that you were NOT trying NOT to because you are smarter than that."  They never had any response to this, they would just stare at the floor... because there isn't one. Try it out on your kids.

So let's all take a breath, pull up our Big Boy Panties and think about this. Yeah, it sucks, maybe it sucks for a couple of months, maybe more, but if we can keep it from spreading unchecked, through simply being smart about how viruses spread and not doing those things that spread it and doing all the things we can do to STOP it from spreading...

Then maybe, just maybe we can make this crack in the path of our lives something we all step across instead of something that swallows us. I hope we can one day look back on this as a very weird time we all experienced, without a staggering death toll, because we collectively, as a species, as one race of human beings in all our wondrous variety... because we were, like the name says, "Homo Sapiens Sapiens"...

Because we were smart about how we acted and we stepped up and showed ourselves as a race that we actually deserve that weird Latin name.

The participle sapiēns means "discerning, wise, sensible"... how about we act like it and beat this thing?

Fly safe my good friends.

=/|)=

Better Than Nothing...

~or "Whatintheabsolutefuckaretheydoing?"

Some fun was had last weekend and some ISK was made... but before I weigh into the fun, understand first that I am broke... I mean under 10m ISK broke and in EVE that's pauper poor, poorhouse poor, debtors prison poor, "I brought the wrong missiles because I can't afford the right ones!!" kinda poor.

So I have been championing PVE lately, cause ISK you know? You gotta PVE to afford the PVP and we are dealing with a few things that have slowed NOMEX activity in all area's down a bit of late... The Loss That Shall Not Be Named is the first.

That kinda loss, well... it's damned hard on a group. To lose such a staggering amount of ships and assets can be stunning. Especially as we were unable to actually put up any kind of a Good Fight.

I joined NOMEX after Visteen was anchored and while I myself lost a complete, newly purchased, fitted, painted, named and never flown fukkin FLEET, on the whole I lost a lot less than some if not most of the rest of the guys. In my case I had been OOG (out of game) for about 3 years and was making a stab at coming back so I was not as emotionally or immediately impacted by the loss... I actually did not hear about it until quite some time after rad counts were down and the wreckage had cooled. But for those who were actively playing, it was as bad as it gets in EVE.

Understand also that all the guys in NOMEX who were involved in the Keepstar knew, as all who choose to live in Anoikis know-in-their-bones that Visteen was lost the day she was anchored.

"One cannot simply anchor a Keepstar inna C2"

and expect it to live very long. Itsa HUGE SHINEY OBJECT IN SPACE which CAN be killed, and it's EVE so it WILL be killed eventually. But man would the guys have LOVED a chance to really see what manning a Keepstar was like at least, but she went down almost without a fight... and that really sucked.

The aftermath is of course, in its own ways as bad as the loss itself... the blow to moral, loss of incentive and desire to play, all the "Where do we live now?", "What do we do now?" and suchlike have to be duly considered and answered to and Decisions Have To Be Made at the Director level.

All of this was happening while I was rediscovering my desire to fill the dead evening hours of this weird warm winter with some EVE time and then my son rejoined and I found myself actually active on a level I have not been for over 3 years... Cool except for the need to rebuild a new Hole Fleet from almost scratch. I did have a couple hundred mil ISK left but it was woefully inadequate to build a new fleet...

So I broke a rule, one I had kept to for over 9 years... I bought PLEX to buy & fit a new fleet. I played the game with a credit card and I don't like that not one bit. But I promised myself, and Tur really, that this was a one-off case due to the circumstances and I after I had a workable Anoikis Fleet I would reinstate and once again uphold The No PLEX Rule.

So I sold off a shit ton of of old stuff, Gecko's I had been hoarding against just such an occasion for one, a few ships I knew I wasn't going to use for two, that plus some PLEX and I had my fleet... which left me under 100m ISK again but I figured NOMEX was set back up inna C5 so ISk was gonna be easy again... well, not so much really.

Yea it seems that other forces than The Loss are at work here. A core group of the guys in NOMEX have flown together long enough to become a "core group" and they play more than a few other games together so when interest in EVE wanes... no biggie, they are all still on TS so they pop down to one of the other games rooms and that's that.

And here I run face first into one of the unassailable walls I have created for myself in my gaming...
(1) I only play EVE
(2) I don't use alts, so I ONLY have Tur.

This has been an issue before for me. If the group I am in is busy in other games or whatever I am left out in the cold playing solo, but that's on me not them.

But I so prefer flying in a group or a gang. You can simply DO so much more. So I have been trying very very hard not to whine and winge and be a pain to everyone while I whine and winge and am a pain to everyone about running some real sites and MAKING SOME ISK... dammit.

So summa the guys, well a few, well a couple... Ok there's this one guy who seems to give a shit at least as far as communicating with me about this topic goes.

The rest... well, we spent an interesting night this past weekend listening to 2 of the (core group) guys explain how "easy" it is to make ISK and how to go about it. I also heard quite a few times things like, "Yea, you should be able to make a lot of ISK running (Incursions, Abyssals, Conduits, etc.) in hisec.", and "(laughing) Not that I've done anything like that in years." and the inevitable, "I just PLEX, it's easier." meaning, 'buying PLEX with a Credit Card to sell for ISK instead of grinding PVE' which I will not do.

I could setup PI, which can be OK-mostly-passive-income but it is not really all that passive in that a good profitable PI setup requires usually at least a once a day login to at the very least "move shit around" and there are always ways you might improve a bit here and tweak it there... and I will not be able to logon every day after the 2020 Regatta Season starts (this year around April 19th) my available "free time" will decrease drastically as I will be onna yacht every weekend, all weekend.

So last week I was down in Hisuc looking into Ships & Fits to try and solo Abyssals, Conduits, etc. when the idea of "PLEXXING on Sunday" started being mentioned on Slack, in Chat and TS. Turns out the guys in NOMEX call running PVE Sites for ISK, "PLEXXING"... I assume from the old, "PVEing to make the ISK to buy a PLEX for a month of game time"... 

So I kept faith and held hope that it might come together and lo and behold it did. Come Sunday early evening we had a nice fleet together. I could have flown a Nestor, as they use a Nestor/Leshak comp, but I no has Nestor and can't fly Leshak to corp spec (yet)... so I was the Noctis pilot. And that was absolutely good with me. I love the Noctis, salvaging was one of my fav roles back in the day.

So I was pretty happy sittin' outside MOB, our Fortizar chillin' and listenin' as the guys learned all about the new unannounced and potentially deadly changes the Chaos Era is bringing us. It seems Drifters now change targets faster and a lot more for one. On the whole the guys did well, only had one ship got into structure before they got him repped back up.

And me? I'd wait til the BM for the MTU at the center of the wreck ball dropped and the site is called "clear" then I'd warp in grab the loots from the MTU and start the music of the 8 Salvagers on all the dead burnt up things... ahhhhhh... just like the old days.

Plus on Saturday 2 of the guys cleared a few Vitals and we nom nommed all the gas, each guy keeping what he huffed. There is talk of chem reactions and facs being setup in our Citadels, but for now I will sell in Jita until we're setup then I'll look into how profitable that looks.

(Nope not even one pic... too busy doin' the ol' hurry up an' wait, all keyed up for that 3 Minutes of Terror & Adrenaline).

And now, The Great Hole Roll Gank... A scout jumped a new hole in KT ("KT" is for some legacy/historical in-corp reason, the name NOMEX always uses for our Static, which in "Ira", our home C5, is also a C5), so he jumps this hole and "Ventures on scan"... We all perk up, Hmmm, jumping Ventures is fun cause they are fast and slippery.

So pings go out and people log on and we all listen for about a 1/2 hour or so as the people in that hole seem to just be taking out and flying around in every ship they have, to what appears to be no clear purpose that we can ascertain. We form up a fleet, a few more scouts jump in and things go as they do, the ol' "hurry up and wait" thing.

Things warp here, things warp there, the scouts and FC's are working the angles, trying to come up with a winnable fight or something at least worth Leroying in and dying gloriously taking down a few shineys for the effort. Eventually the guys we're watching catch wind of us and react... and the FC's call a Hole Roll Logoff Gank, everyone on the Ira side of the Ira/KT hole logs off and gets right back on the login screen and keeps ready to log in and kill whatever they decide to roll with...

I was inna Sabre initially, but decide to swap over to DPS as we now had 2 HICs, so bubbles were covered and DPS was needed more. I swap over to my Cloaky HAM Loki, warp out and cloak up 10km off the KT hole... annnnnnnnnd

Megathron 1
POD 1
Megathron 2
POD 2
Megathron 3
POD 3
Megathron 4
POD4

Oh and in case you were wondering about the title, "Better than Nothing..." that refers to the fact that we had hoped for Rolling Caps and only got Megas... Oh well, better than nothing... right?

Like I said, some fun was had. =]


And one last tidbit that kept me VERY busy lately... I moved. Since I was about 5 months old (in game) I have been a full time permanent resident of Anoikis (Wormhole Space, Negative Sec) and to me Empire Space (Known Space, Hi, Lo & Null) are where I go to sell my goods and go shopping. Unless of course my home go boom (see "The Loss That Shall Not Be Named") then I "refugee" in Empire until a new home is built and my rooms are ready in our new hole.

Empire is also where I store my Ship replacements, Tur's Shadow Fleet (which also needs to be rebuilt) and any Empire specific ships I own. I have refugee'd in Amarr over the years of my cloistering, but now that I am walking the world again, I decided I was just too tired of (1) Amarr prices being just a tad higher than Jita, it adds up over the years, and (2) being shit out the ass of that Great Gold Egg of a station every time I undocked.

I so prefer a nice, reasonable "door" that lets one enter space in style and grace and without vertigo... so I moved to Jita. Not in 4-4, gods I'd HATE that worse than Amarr... can't stand the station design (never could) and the sheer number of A-holes in space, especially at the 4-4 undock... just gives me hives it does.

So I tootled around on Sat and took a good look at the other real estate available in Jita and I found a nice place, a quiet place off the main trade lanes, not a lot of neighbors, good schools, day care, really good restaurants and I like the look of it I really do.

So I spent an evening or 3 carefully packing every square m3 of "Canterbury", my Oracabago Floaty Home of Ineptitude, with everything I own and fast warping from Amarr through Perimeter to my new home in the Jita VII - Moon 2 (Jita 7-2) Caldari Business Tribunal Law School.

It was actually kinda fun. I am finding new things to be interesting and interested in and I am very much liking this new foray into EVE... I truly am.

Fly safe or not, I'll still be cloaked up watching you.
=/|)=

Sometimes You Gotta Change the Sand in the Sandbox

~or “Change Hurts Like Hell, Until it Doesn't Anymore...”

This is a post born of a the rummage of thoughts I have been having on the recent changes and direction CCP seems to be taking the game, and all of us, as we head deeper into The Chaos Era... which most definitely is Still Very Much a Thing in EVE. In a comment 'tween myself and Hermit, it all kinda gelled into this post.

Chaos is bad, right? But what is “Bad” and what is “Good” are subjective are they not? So I say Chaos is also subjective... I mean one man's tragedy (Hurricane [the storm not the ship], Tornado [the storm not the ship], Earthquake [the natural disaster not the ammo], etc.) that wipes out his house and home is another man's land and redevelopment opportunity.

If you are not a miner or involved much in Industry, as I and The Forever Noob are not (and though I have been on the other side of the lazers in a mining gank once or twice, it has never been my preferred playstyle) then these recent and seeming drastic changes to the game, what seems like a truly massive shit CCP is taking all over mining returns and ore availability, may not immediately impact you or your gameplay, yet.. However, those mining changes WILL be hittin' all of us in the wallet in the months to come, like a Dreadnought Alpha Strike direct to the Nads...

And I have just This to say about That... <takes a deep breath...>

Actually go and listen to what Hilmar himself has to say YOUROWNDAMNSELF in this podcast where he introduced us all to The Chaos Era... and The Why. (the link is to the point where he begins to speak directly to the Chaos Era but I strongly suggest you listen to the beginning also). Don't wait for someone else to boil it down and tell you how to feel about what he says... listen for yourself. Decide for yourself. You may be surprized.

He actually does explain it all, and IMHO I think he does so quite well, if you actually take the time to listen and don't let yourself get all bogged down in little shit... don't sweat that Ashterothi makes a big deal out of his mistake of saying “Purple Donut” instead of “Blue”, he is being interviewed and by EVE Players none the less... his getting the 'color' wrong is a fukkin little ass thing ya'll, so please focus on what he says “about” the game.

About how EVE is stagnating, about how because of the Alliances, Coalitions, Peace Treaties and Agreements made between all the Null Powers That Be (the players)... that the Sandbox is turning to cement.

If you are interested in my take on this it is simply that because of us, a significant majority of the playerbase, EVE Online is dying. Not because of CCP, because of us.

That's right, I said it and I will say it again... because of us. Because we want to have control over what happens to us... because we want to feel safe and if possible, BE safe. It is as natural and human as sex or greed or empathy or anger. We want to be safe and do the things we enjoy and profit by from a place of safety.

No one likes Surprise Buttsex unless they are the one's giving it, and the Cyan Donut came about because we, the players, working Outside Of The Game, agreed to work together for Prosperity And Safety For All, which is how we ended up with the vaunted and reviled “Blue Donut” a state of peace throughout Nullsec that is enforced with tenacity, zeal and at a level that makes Concord's Law & Order enforcement efforts in Hisec seem like 2 guys with BB-guns comin to your rescue inna canoe...

This “Pax Congregatio“ is enforced throughout all of domesticated and peacefully farmed Nullsec, where tenement and sharecropping ratters, miners and bots are all treated with respect and integrity while being squeezed for every possible Red ISKie their Nullsec Overlandlords can wring from them.

Oh Gentleman's Agreement fights are acceptable and yes, there is always some “real” strife of course, WWB was a real enough thing, but once a Null Empire is established, the diplomats begin working in earnest to KEEP it established and to keep things inside their borders humming along productively and under a shield of safety that is a Hisec Carebear's Wet Dream...

Let's be very clear, people working together for Prosperity And Safety For All is exactly what is most desired and needed in the Real World ('cause no clones in the Real World) but EVE is not the Real World... it is a Virtual World filled with malevolence and hate and tears and greed and suffering and Ebil Oberlords and Their Miscreant Minions and Pirates.. It is a star cluster full of conflict and passion, fear and death, taxes and carebear tears and because it is all of this, it is also a 'verse filled with friendship, camaraderie, sacrifice, hard work and yes, love.

Without the Dark, one cannot have Light, without Grief, one cannot have Joy, without Failure, one cannot have Success. And EVE, EVE is not about Hugz and Rainbows my brothers in arms... Hugz and Rainbows, as nice as they are, are boring and now so is EVE as all of nullsec huggz and sways along to Kumbaya, EVE Online has become Boring... and CCP Himar my gentle reader, one of that small group of guys who together so long ago dreamed a big dream, a dream of a 'verse that is EVE... CCP Hilmar has decided to Go to War Against the Forces of Boredom... And that means against Us.

Because my brother Empyrean's... we suck at EVE, not CCP, us. Many of us, or at least a large and very vocal number of us are entitled, nasty, dreadful, horrid children and we have no respect for what CCP has created for us.
“We” have tamed EVE...
“We” have made EVE docile and safe...
and CCP Himar is pissed and he is going to DO something about it.

And I for one, think it's high time he did.

Thanx Hermie.  =]

Fly it like the Po-Po aint coming!

=/|)=